Pistonlog ships with four working actors — Owner, Manager, Reception, Technician — plus an Accountant role that can only view financial reports, covering 99% of garages. If your operation needs something different, you can create custom roles with any combination of the 58 permission keys.
When to create one
- A senior technician who needs to see unit costs (gets
parts.view_cost) - A workshop diagnostician who needs to ring customers directly. Technicians already hold
customers.view, but customer names and contact details are stripped from the data for anyone whose role is named Technician. The fix is a separate role with a different name, such as "Diagnostician", carrying the same keys. See the PII rule. - An inspector who creates inspections but doesn't touch jobcards
(For an external bookkeeper, the built-in Accountant role already covers financial reports and nothing else.)
How to create one
Open Workshop Settings → Roles & Permissions
Under the People & Access section of Workshop Settings.
Click Create Role
Name the role (e.g. "Senior reception") and optionally add a description.
Tick permissions
The permission matrix is shown — see Permissions reference. Tick the ones this role should have. The five diagnostics.* keys don't have a toggle in the matrix yet, so a custom role can't be given diagnostics access this way.
Assign team members
From the team list, change anyone's role to your new custom one. They keep their existing access until you change them.
Things to remember
- Roles are per garage. A custom role created at Bristol doesn't exist at Bath until you create it there too.
- No "deny" — only "allow". Permissions are additive. If you want someone who can do everything except delete jobcards, just don't tick
jobcards.delete. - Owner bypasses everything. Custom roles never restrict the owner.
- The technician PII rule follows the role's name, not its permissions. Any role called "Technician" has customer names, contact details and addresses stripped out of the data before it reaches them. Name a custom role something else and the strip doesn't apply, whatever keys it holds.
- Non-owners can't escalate. A non-owner editing a role can only grant permissions they hold themselves, and only the owner can grant role management or team management to a role.
Auditing
The team list shows each member's role at a glance. To see exactly which permissions a role grants, open the role card in Roles & Permissions — useful when "why can't they do X?" comes up. Every role and permission change is also recorded in an internal audit log.